The first problem seems to be related to a broken package database. Open the offending files (in /var/db...) in a text editor and look for null characters, carriage returns or whatever else that shouldn't be there. PROVIDE should probably be empty, USE and CONTENTS should not.

Seems i either have to emerge -C every kde/whatever app or juse the dep script.

Am runing dep -P and it seems good so far but is there not some manual or explanation for a non programmer to follow? - i've glaned over the thread (thanks!) and can only really see discussion of the script from a programmers point of view.

There's no manual that I know of (other than dep -h). I would use the spring-clean (-s) option. The usual disclaimer of not removing things blindly applies, of course._________________Please read our FAQ Forum, it answers many of your questions.
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The CONTENTS file contains every file, symlink and directory that were installed when you emerged the package. Without it portage won't know what to remove while uninstalling. You can look in the CONTENTS file of some other package for how the file should look, but that won't help you any if it is completely borked. You don't want to put the current mtime and checksum in it as the files may have been overwritten by a newer version of the package. The best way around this is to delete that directory so as to fool portage into believing that version isn't installed, and then use ecatmur's cruft script to clean out files that does not belong to any installed package._________________Please read our FAQ Forum, it answers many of your questions.
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